Digital Marketing & Traditional Marketing: How They Complement Each Other

All small businesses need to watch
their budget, that’s not saying anything new, but to grow and thrive they also
need to invest in marketing.

The big question is – what type of marketing
to spend their budget on? How do you know where it will be most effective and
provide the greatest return?

Answering this question is far from
simple. To know where the budget will be best allocated, small businesses need
to broadly understand the different approaches to marketing in order to make an
informed and educated decision on what will best suit their particular business.

But for many businesses a digital and traditional approach to marketing are clearly complementary strategies. Being able to define the business vision and communicating that to potential customers still works well for some businesses in print format. Yet interacting directly with an audience online through digital tools such as websites and social media also has its advantages.

I recently
spoke to experts from both the traditional marketing and digital marketing
fields to find out their views on the benefits of each approach….

The Traditional Viewpoint

Ginette Gower, Founder of The Marketing Voice UK, understands the increasing emphasis on digital marketing methods, “It’s absolutely correct that companies have a digital marketing strategy as this can have a much greater reach than some traditional marketing methods; but it’s also important that businesses include face-to-face client and prospect engagement.

Building
relationships face-to-face with your audience enables businesses to communicate
their passion and vision in a way that is more powerful than via a digital
approach. Whether through workshops, presentations, events or networking, this
is a powerful way to communicate”.

Ginette has
the experience to elicit that passion and vision from the business owners or
senior executives. She builds a rapport with clients and prospects and has used
her business story-telling skills to help numerous businesses grow and succeed.

She injects personality and important insights into the in-depth articles she writes for clients. They are published in highly regarded magazines such as the Business Voice quarterly magazine from the Thames Valley Chamber of Commerce.

Of course,
magazines also have online versions so there is an additional benefit that a
magazine article can increase online presence and potentially gain a valuable
backlink for a website. A clear way where the traditional complements the
digital approach to marketing – just with a bit more personality.

The Digital Viewpoint

Vicky White, Founder & Digital Marketing Expert from Vicky White Communications also gave us her view on how digital marketing overlaps with a more traditional approach, but from the digital perspective.

Vicky combines both online & offline marketing to work in harmony, as she explains, “for instance, a LinkedIn marketing campaign can be combined very successfully with attending networking events and building face-to-face relationships with people connected through LinkedIn.

It’s important, not to just connect with others on
LinkedIn but to also ensure you continue to engage with them. This might be
through regular posts by sharing news updates, podcasts or top tips articles.
Or could be a direct message suggesting a follow up coffee after the event or
simply just to check in to see if you can help each other in any way.

I’ve also found that GDPR has had a major effect
on the email marketing aspect of digital marketing and some businesses have had
to look outside this particular Marketing channel to reach their customers. Some
of the methods being used to ensure GDPR compliance include traditional direct mail
marketing, such as hand-written postcards through the letterbox – a nice touch
in a digital world”.

However, the
whole area of social media marketing is a completely different approach. It
enables regular connections and conversations with customers and prospects not
just with occasional insights and news but with constant “touch points” that
ensure a brand, it’s products and opinions remain at the forefront of
customers’ attention.

Combining text content with other sorts of digital content such as video, graphics and podcasts can have a limitless reach, that will also remain visible and ‘found’ online for the foreseeable future.

The Common Ground

As with
traditional marketing, digital marketing also makes use of well-researched and well-written
content. The audience may be different and the methods of reaching that
audience are certainly different; but content is an essential part of all
marketing.

In the
digital realm press releases are distributed to online press portals, featured
on websites and published on social channels. In the traditional realm they are
submitted to newspapers and magazines but their purpose is still the same – to
disseminate something noteworthy to a relevant audience.

And whether
the content originates from a traditional or digital marketing campaign, it
always forms a useful element in the search engine optimisation (SEO) aspects
of digital marketing.

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About Our Blog

Small business owners can often struggle to get their business off the ground and start making a profit. We believe that businesses often fail because they have not taken the right approach to marketing – after all we all know it is not because of bad products or services that businesses don't succeed. So here on this blog we like to just provide some tips and advice for small businesses (including our accumulated knowledge) on how to get your marketing right, including your digital marketing and search engine optimization. Because you can always learn lessons from other people's mistakes and sometimes it's good just to chat – a problem shared and all that.

But a successful small business is not all about the right marketing approach so we also discuss money tips and cost-saving efficiencies particularly when it comes to staff and premises. Too many small businesses take on the big financial commitment of a swish new office and expensive warehousing facilities when there are much more cost-effective options for businesses such office space in a small business hub or self-storage instead of a warehouse. Equally it is no longer necessary to take on all staff as permanent employees as many people prefer the flexibility of freelance work and remote working.

So join us by commenting on anything that strikes a chord with you – we love to hear other people's opinions and if you have a small business success story to share we would be particularly interested to hear about it.